could be more complicated - but without more informations it is hard to guess:what version of aem?author system clustered?multiple activations at the same time?recommended hotfixes installed?something in the error log at the activation time?

Hiregarding purging of versions - you can configure the behaviour of the versions purge service via osgi configuration (Day CQ WCM Version Manager) - default setting is to not purge any versions (but you can change this :-)).Christian

Hihave you checked the existing child page nodes with crx/de/ ? i've seen this behaviour when the jcr:content node was missing for one of the child pages (maybe due to importing content with not existing parent nodes).if this is the root cause of your problem i think Adobe has a hotfix for 5.6.1 sol...